The gender of Twitter relationships

Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women.
Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users
follow each other. This "follower split" suggests that women are driven
less by followers than men, or have more stringent thresholds for
reciprocating relationships. This is intriguing, especially given that
females hold a slight majority on Twitter: we found that men comprise
45% of Twitter users, while women represent 55%. To get this figure, we
cross-referenced users' "real names" against a database of 40,000
strongly gendered names.

Even more interesting is who follows whom. We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly,
an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman.
Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another
man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different
tweeting activity – both men and women tweet at the same rate.

I wonder if there’s any kind of celebrity effect here (I’m thinking of a friend I know with a mutual interest in cycling, who follows Lance Armstrong, Cadel Evans, and probably every other ProTour cyclist he can think of, all of whom are male…) I’ve heard of celebrity women on Twitter too (Claire McCaskill), but I’ve heard of a lot more men, and you would expect celebrities to have a lot of followers. (Then again, you wouldn’t expect them to have many reciprocated relationships, but there’s no reason the reciprocated and the widely-followed have to be the same…)

I’m not likely to follow people I don’t know well if they’re mostly talking about their personal lives (what do I care if a stranger burned the popcorn or signed up for a 5K?), but I will follow strangers if they post about projects, news, or specific subjects. If men do more of the latter it would make sense that they’re more widely followed; you don’t have to be part of their close social circle to be interested.